Alabama funding may hinder NRA plan for school guards

Springville Police reserve officer Kuyler Palmer patrols the halls at Springville Elementary Monday and gets a high five from kindergarten student Thomas Tyler. Security was heightened at schools across the nation as students returned to class following Friday's school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. (Joe Songer/jsonger@al.com)

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The National Rifle Association's call to put armed officers in every U.S. school could be tough to implement in Alabama, where funding may be a challenge to hiring hundreds of additional guards.

The NRA announced its plan in the days after a mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., where 20 elementary school students were killed.

The Alabama Association of School Resource Officers says the state has about 200 armed officers covering more than 1,500 schools. That means a maximum of about one in every seven schools has an officer on campus at any time.

The president of the officer association, Pamela Revels, said funding is typically the main roadblock to more patrols inside schools, not resistance from parents or educators.

"They love us," said Revels, a corporal with the sheriff's office in Lee County.

Officers are assigned to Lee County's 13 schools, concentrating particularly on the high schools. Officers also visit elementary and middle schools as needed, she said.

The executive director of the Alabama Association of School Boards, Sally Howell, said the big question aside from funding is who would be allowed to carry weapons in schools.

"One of the issues that come up with the NRA proposal is who do you give a gun," Howell said. "I would think most people would want a person who has a gun in a school to be trained to the level of a law enforcement officer."

Northeast of Birmingham, in rural Blount County, a tobacco tax is used to fund a squad of nine armed sheriff's deputies and a supervisor who are assigned to work inside the system's 16 schools on a full-time basis, said superintendent Jim Carr.

Officers patrol each of the county's schools daily, and they also assist at after-school events like football games and beauty pageants in the 8,500-student system, he said.

"I am certainly much more comfortable as a superintendent being in a system where we have resource officers in schools," Carr said. "As I like to say, we'll never know what their presence prevented."

The school resource officers initially were funded through a federal grant, but voters approved using the tobacco money for the program once it expired, Carr said.

In Shelby County, Sheriff Chris Curry said he will take nine deputies off regular patrol after the first of the year and place them in schools to increase safety despite county commissioners' refusal to provide additional funding. Having officers in schools can save lives during a shooting by reducing police response time, he said.

Revels said a plan to fund resource officers with part of a county tax failed in Lee County, so the Sheriff's Department footed more of the cost from its budget. Officials hope to try again to get voters to approve the tax, she said.

Howell said there's a lot to be gained from having police in schools.

"It's a great way to keep our youth on the right pathway and for (police) to get an idea of what's going on in the communities," she said. "Students, if they hear things and know things, can report things to the SROs."

But problems can arise, too.

In Birmingham, the presence of police officers in public schools led to a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court by the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center over officers' practice of using pepper spray on students. The center says officers used the spray on students about 200 times over a five-year period starting in 2006.

While the lawsuit contends the practice harms students, city police say that the plaintiffs are misrepresenting facts and that police are only trying to deal with problems that arise in schools.